Purpose: There is increasing interest in using automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to evaluate impairment severity or speech intelligibility in speakers with dysarthria. We assessed the clinical validity of one currently available off-the-shelf (OTS) ASR system (i.e., a Google Cloud ASR API) for indexing sentence-level speech…

Purpose: Perceptual training paradigms, which leverage the mechanism of perceptual learning, show that naïve listeners, those with no prior experience with dysarthria, benefit from explicit familiarization with a talker with dysarthria. It is theorized that familiarization affords listeners an opportunity to acquire distributional knowledge of the…

Purpose: Although recruitment of cognitive-linguistic resources to support dysarthric speech perception and adaptation is presumed by theoretical accounts of effortful listening and supported by cross-disciplinary empirical findings, prospective relationships have received limited attention in the disordered speech literature. This study aimed to…

Purpose: As evidenced by perceptual learning studies involving adult listeners and speakers with dysarthria, adaptation to dysarthric speech is driven by signal predictability (speaker property) and a flexible speech perception system (listener property). Here, we extend adaptation investigations to adolescent populations and examine whether adult…

Purpose: Good verbal signals and low background noise are key factors for all children to maximize understanding of what is being taught. Classroom shape, surroundings, and even furnishings change how the environment "sounds" and how speech is "heard" in the classroom. Classroom acoustics is perhaps one of the most important,…

It has been shown in the past that International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) struggle with phonological and communication issues in the classroom (Pickering, 1999; 2001). This issue leads to misunderstandings between ITAs and undergraduate students, frustrating them both as well as the parents of the students and the departments. However, studies…

There has been a long-standing interest in projection and the resources on which participants rely to produce and recognize the import and organization of turns at talk. Less attention has been paid to the character of the activity in which utterances form part and the ways in which embodied action enables the intelligibility, coordination, and in…

Reading skills are usually assessed in silent conditions, but children often experience noisy educational settings. Effects of auditory distraction on children's reading skills remain relatively unexplored. The present study investigates the influence of two features of background speech--intelligibility and loudness--on children's reading speed…

This controlled experimental study investigated the interaction of variables associated with rating the pronunciation component of high-stakes English-language-speaking tests such as IELTS and TOEFL iBT. One hundred experienced raters who were all either familiar or unfamiliar with Brazilian-accented English or Papua New Guinean Tok Pisin-accented…

The present systematic review examines Glenn Fulcher's contributions, works, philosophy, and research in language testing and assessment. The data includes his published articles, book chapters, books and interviews (except the one in this special issue) relevant to language testing and assessment from 1987 to March 2022. This study is conducted…

This study investigates strategies employed by East Asian international students to cope with comprehension barriers caused by different types of English accents. While these students face a range of comprehension barriers caused by unfamiliar accented English (from both native speakers and speakers of other languages), little is known about how…

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of visually presented speech envelope information with various modulation rates and depths on audiovisual speech perception in noise. Method: Forty adults (21.25 ± 1.45 years) participated in audiovisual sentence recognition measurements in noise. Target speech sentences were auditorily presented in…

Purpose: The aim of this research note is to introduce a new appraisal form, the Classroom Communication and Collaboration (C3) Appraisal, designed to evaluate communication and collaboration within classroom settings. Method: A comprehensive synthesis of the key skills from a broad range of publications on successful communication and…

This study tracked the development of Hong Kong's assessment practices for English pronunciation over the past four decades, with reference to the nativeness and intelligibility principles in L2 pronunciation research and pedagogy. Specifically, it evaluated changes in assessors' comments on candidates' English pronunciation performance in…

As there is a growing population of non-native speakers worldwide, facilitating communication involving native and non-native speakers has become increasingly important. While one way to help communication involving native and non-native speakers is to help non-native speakers improve proficiency in their target language, another way is to help…